The present invention relates to metallurgical vessels used as converters, and more particularly to such a vessel which is mounted for tilting movement about supporting journals, and to the means for delivering media to the vessel for use in treating the contents within the vessel or for use in cooling the outside walls of the vessel.
The use of different gaseous and/or liquid media in the metallurgical industry for either treating metallurgical melts contained in the tiltable vessels or for cooling the outer walls of the vessels has been increasing thus requiring more and more individual feed and delivery pipes to and from the vessel for delivering the gaseous and/or liquid media. It has been typical to pass such feed and delivery pipes through one or more bores extending through the core of at least one of the supporting journals for the vessel in order to deliver the media either to the interior of the vessel or to the outside walls note DE-OS 2 034 690 DE-OS 2 065 176.
Such an arrangement, however, has the disadvantage that only a small amount of media can be fed or delivered through the journal to the interior of the vessel or to its outer walls in the event that the supporting journals become weakened as a result of the bores which extend through its core. Some metallurgical vessels have receptacles which are mounted on a supporting ring, which in turn are mounted on supporting journals for tilting the receptacle. In such vessels, opening the supporting ring and continuing the feed and delivery pipes through the supporting ring are other disadvantages. By leading the delivery and feed pipes out of the supporting ring to points on the receptacle for delivery either to the interior of the receptacle or to its outside walls tends to considerably reduce the resistance moment of the supporting ring. In addition, in such an arrangement screw couplings for the pipes and the pipes themselves leading to the receptacle are usually positioned behind the ring and become difficult to reach.
Because of the need to control the activity within the vessel and for cooling the outside walls of the vessel, it is frequently necessary to arrange as many as forty separate pipes leading to and from the vessel to provide the required media. If this number of separate feed and delivery pipes were to be conducted through a single central bore extending through one of the supporting journals, an extremely oversized central journal bore resulting in an oversized outside journal diameter, would be required to accommodate the pipes. This would not be suitable to obtain the necessary resistance moment required of the journal. When using a vessel which has a receptacle mounted on a supporting ring, a maze of pipes would exist at the outlet of the journal bore making control and arrangement of the pipes difficult.
It is accordingly a principal object of the present invention to provide a means for delivering media to the interior and/or outside walls of a receptacle for a metallurgical vessel through at least one of the supporting journals, without requiring that the pipes extend through a central bore of the journal.
Other objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become more apparent from the description of the invention in connection with the accompanying drawings to be described more fully hereinafter.